Edu-Snippets
The positivity principle; user-generated flashcards versus premade flashcards
Highlights:
Learners perform better when taught by instructors displaying positive emotions rather than negative emotions.
User-generated digital flashcards yield better learning than premade ones.
Do video lectures with a positive tone improve learning? Is there evidence for positivity principle?
The positivity principle suggests that learners perform better when on-screen instructors display positive rather than negative emotions. The positivity principle is based on a cognitive-affective model of e-learning. To test the hypotheses, Lawson et al. (2021a, 2021b) conducted two experiments in which psychology students viewed a short video lecture on a statistics topic. In each version of the presentation, an instructor stood next to a series of slides as she lectured. However, her teaching exhibited different emotional tones in different videos.
Experiment 1: Ninety-six students were randomly assigned to four subgroups. Each subgroup watched a video lecture that featured an on-screen instructor with a different emotional tone. Twenty-three participants were in the happy instructor (positive / active) group, 25 participants were in the content instructor (positive / passive) group, 24 participants were in the frustrated instructor (negative / active), and 24 participants were in the bored instructor (negative / passive group). In the videos, emotions were conveyed through the instructor’s voice, gestures, facial expressions, body positioning and eye gaze. After watching the assigned video lesson, each participant was tested on the content covered in the video lesson. Finally, they completed a post-questionnaire in which they described their experience with the lesson.
Experiment 2: This was a replication of experiment 1 involving 114 psychology students with one key difference: participants in experiment 2 completed a delayed post-test, meaning they waited a week between the learning phase (i.e., video watching phase) and the testing phase.
Results:
In both experiments, learners were able to recognize the emotional tone of the instructor in the video. They correctly identified the positive emotions of the positive instructor and the negative emotions of the negative instructor.
Both experiments demonstrated that the learners with a positive instructor rated their instructor as more credible and engaging than those with a negative instructor.
In both the experiments, learners with a positive instructor reported paying more attention than the learners with a negative instructor.
Lastly, the differences between the positive and negative instructors had an impact on learning outcomes. When tested immediately after watching the video, there were no appreciable differences (Experiment 1). However, on the delayed post-test (Experiment 2), participants who were taught by a positive instructor scored higher than the learners who were taught by a negative instructor.
This study offers support for the positivity principle, which posits that people learn more effectively from instructors who express positive emotions rather than negative emotions. However, further studies are needed to determine whether these findings persist across video lessons of different length, different types of learners, and different learning situations. The positivity principle may also have implications for AI generated voices used in multimedia video lessons.
What kind of flashcards yield better learning - the ones you create yourself or the premade ones?
Many learners use flashcards to help them study. When it comes to digital flashcards, users have a choice between creating their own flashcard content (also referred to as user-generated flashcards) or using pre-built flashcard sets available on the web (also known as premade flashcards). Currently, the premade flashcards are the more popular choice because they are more convenient and save time (Pan et al., 2023). It makes sense to take advantage of the millions of premade flashcard sets that are freely available online. However, this raises a question: is there educational value in creating one’s own digital flashcards? To answer this question, Pan et al. (2023) conducted a series of experiments (six in total) involving 284 undergraduate students. In each experiment, participants read two passages of text, after which they spent 20 - 25 minutes working with flashcards. In one condition, students simply used premade flashcards for retrieval practice (i.e., self-testing), to improve their retention of the materials. In the other condition, students created their own flashcards and then used those flashcards for retrieval practice. After 48 hours, the researchers administered a delayed test that contained both definition and application questions (i.e., measuring memory and transfer of learning respectively). The researchers also studied the methods students used to create flashcard content. Some of the methods included word -by-word transcription, copying and pasting, paraphrasing, and generating examples.
Results:
Across the experiments, researchers found that user-generated flashcards improved memory relative to premade ones, and in most cases also enhanced user performance on application questions. Findings from this study suggest that generating one’s own content prior to retrieval practice can enhance learning more than retrieval practice alone. Pan et al. (2023) point out that premade flashcards, despite their convenience, cause users to miss out on the learning benefits derived from making one’s own flashcards. Additionally, the researchers observe that the quality of premade flashcards, downloaded from the web, cannot be guaranteed. With regards to the different methods of creating one’s flashcards, researchers noted that paraphrasing and copying-and-pasting appeared to improve overall performance. Generating examples enhanced the recall of definitions, while word-for-word transcribing was found to be less effective.
This study has practical implications for students who regularly use flashcards as a study aid. Creating one’s own flashcards is likely to be more beneficial for long-term learning and transferability.
References:
Lawson, A. P., Mayer, R. E., Adamo-Villani, N., Benes, B., Lei, X., & Cheng, J. (2021a). The positivity principle: do positive instructors improve learning from video lectures? Educational Technology Research and Development, 69, 3101-3129.
Lawson, A. P., Mayer, R. E., Adamo-Villani, N., Benes, B., Lei, X., & Cheng, J. (2021b). Recognizing the emotional state of human and virtual instructors. Computers in Human Behavior, 114, 106554.
Mayer, R. E. (2020). Searching for the role of emotions in e-learning. Learning and Instruction, 70, 101213.
Pan, S. C., Zung, I., Imundo, M. N., Zhang, X., & Qiu, Y. (2023). User-generated digital flashcards yield better learning than premade flashcards. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 12(4), 574–588.
Re: Making one's own flashcards
The research supports what most of us 'know' from experience.
I am curious to know a few things, though:
a) LIke Linyi Wang asks, how does working with good-quality premade cards compare with using self-made cards.
b) Consider the times table, for example -- very basic facts, one fact to a card. I don't think it would make much of a difference whether one is using premade cards or self-made cards, except when one is adding mnemonic hints or other very personal cues.
But let's say we are trying to digest/internalize a book on, say, cognitive biases. More complex connections and relations to master here. Let us suppose a teacher has prepared good-quality cards for his/her students. I believe that however good those cards might be, it would be better for a student to create his/her own.
So the questions are: Should a learner creating her/his own flashcards use them only for facts and very basic connections? Or, pick important passages dealing with the connections and summarizations and create Cloze cards? Or use the Cloze passages initially to master the connections, then work only on remembering the facts?
It makes sense that making one's own flashcards can enhance learning since the brain works harder to make sense of the learning material during this process.
A further study may be valuable to compare spending the same amount of time making students' own flashcards and using good-quality pre-made flashcards before a delayed test. Such a study mimics real-life situations in which students have limited time and energy to study and inevitable distractions from other activities before their tests. Are there any published articles for studies conducted this way?